Monday, September 08, 2014

It is the case of an article on Muon Tomography, titled New Muon Detector Could Find Hidden Nukes. The article appeared a few days ago on Wired.
It is centered on Lisa Grossman's interview to Marcus Hohlmann, a
colleague from the Florida Institute of Technology. In a nutshell, the
article explains how muon particles from cosmic rays can be used to
detect heavy elements (as in nuclear fuel) hidden in transport
containers. And what makes things sexier is that the used technology is a
spin-off from experiments from particle physics. See:Muon Tomography: Who Is Leading The Research ?

Beginning next year, two detectors (shown here in green) on either side
of Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit 2 will record the path of muons (represented
by the orange line) that have passed through the reactor. By
determining how the muons scatter between the detectors, scientists will
compile the first picture of the damaged reactor’s interior. See: Particle physics to aid nuclear cleanup

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The progression of Muon Tomography, is an interesting subject in relation to what can be used to help us understand issues we face here on earth. Situations that need new ways in which to diagnostically deal with extreme situations. Example given in relation too, rock density, magma flows, or, even nuclear reactors.

One has to learn to understand "links that are dropped" which pursue a thread of evolution. These help one to understand the processional use of the technologies as used to understand the ways things are measured in those extreme situations. Sensor-ability, then takes on a new meaning while using current scientific research and understandings in particle physics.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Sarah Parcak is an archaeologist and Egyptologist, and specializes in
making the invisible past visible using 21st-century satellite
technology. She co-directs the Survey and Excavation Projects in the
Fayoum, Sinai, and Egypt's East Delta with her husband, Dr. Greg
Mumford. Parcak is the author of Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology,
the first methods book on satellite archaeology, and her work has
seeded several TV documentaries. She founded and directs the Laboratory
for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

While most Google Earth hobbyists are satisfied with a bit of snapping and geotagging, some have far loftier ambitions.
Satellite archaeologist Angela Micol thinks she's discovered the
locations of some of Egypt's lost pyramids, buried for centuries under
the earth, including a three-in-a-line arrangement similar to those on
the Giza Plateau. Egyptologists have already confirmed that the secret
locations are undiscovered, so now it's down to scientists in the field
to determine if it's worth calling the diggers in.

It is of great consequence that while we understand the sun has it's place in the sky, do we understand the interactions that are taking place as the Earth radiates as well? If thunderstorms can releases information for us, then it puts a whole new spin on what is happening within Earth's space.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

If like myself you are watching the history of communication, it becomes important to understand the advances we have on the horizon for when we are looking across the expanse of space for consideration of that information transference.

Like radio waves, neutrino beams spread out. Moving farther away from the neutrino source is somewhat like driving away from a radio tower: Eventually you lose the signal. Until physicists create more intense beams of neutrinos or build more powerful detectors, the goal of using neutrinos to communicate with people under the sea or outside Earth’s orbit will remain out of reach.See:Scientists send encoded message through rock via neutrino beam

While relativistic interpretations are understood with Muon detection scenarios we are able to understand some things about the earth that we had not known before. So in this case we see where such communications are already defining for us some information about the world we live in.

Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.

We examine the possibility to employ neutrinos to communicate within the galaxy. We discuss various issues associated with transmission and reception, and suggest that the resonant neutrino energy near 6.3 PeV may be most appropriate. In one scheme we propose to make Z^o particles in an overtaking e^+ - e^- collider such that the resulting decay neutrinos are near the W^- resonance on electrons in the laboratory. Information is encoded via time structure of the beam. In another scheme we propose to use a 30 PeV pion accelerator to create neutrino or anti-neutrino beams. The latter encodes information via the particle/anti-particle content of the beam, as well as timing. Moreover, the latter beam requires far less power, and can be accomplished with presently foreseeable technology. Such signals from an advanced civilization, should they exist, will be eminently detectable in neutrino detectors now under construction. See:Galactic Neutrino Communication by John G. Learned, Sandip Pakvasa, A. Zee

Sunday, September 25, 2011

According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, a clock moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light with respect to an observer runs more slowly than the observer's own clock. This implies that time must be flowing more slowly in a moving frame of reference, which is referred to as time dilation. If a process (such as the decay of an unstable particle) occurs with an average lifetime of in the rest frame, the lifetime of the particle moving at speed is given by , where is the speed of light, 2.9979 × m/sec. The decay of muons has provided verification of Einstein's formula to a high degree of accuracy. The negative muon , with a mass of 105.7 MeV/, is the second-generation lepton analogous to the electron . The antiparticles and (the positron) are similarly related. The mean lifetime of free muon decay is 2.197 sec in the rest frame. The decay processes are and . Here is a neutrino and an antineutrino, each occurring in both electron and muon flavors. In finer detail, these weak-interaction processes involve bosons as intermediates.

High-energy collisions of protons produce copious numbers of pions, which, in turn, decay into muons. This all happens within the blue square in the graphic. The beam of muons thus produced is injected into a circular synchrotron, which can accelerate them to energies up to 10,000 MeV (10 GeV). The lifetimes are then determined as a function of energy. Muons accelerated to 750 MeV already travel at 99% the speed of light and have average lifetimes enhanced by an order of magnitude. At the maximum energy available in this Demonstration, speeds of 0.9999 are achieved and the muon lifetime is increased by a factor of 100.

Earlier experiments on muons produced by cosmic rays found their half-lives to be dependent on distance traveled through the atmosphere; they also exhibited relativistic time dilation.

It has been recently shown that puzzling excess events observed by the LSND and MiniBooNE neutrino experiments could be interpreted as a signal from the radiative decay of a heavy sterile neutrino (nu_h) of the mass from 40 to 80 MeV with a muonic mixing strength ~ 10^{-3} - 10^{-2}. If such nu_h exists its admixture in the ordinary muon decay would result in the decay chain mu -> e nu_e nu_h -> e nu_e gamma nu. We proposed a new experiment for a sensitive search for this process in muon decay at rest allowing to definitively confirm or exclude the existence of the nu_h. To our knowledge, no experiment has specifically searched for the signature of radiative decay of massive neutrinos from muon decays as proposed in this work. The search is complementary to the current experimental efforts to clarify the origin of the LSND and MiniBooNE anomalies. Bounds on the muonic mixing strength from precision measurements with muons are discussed.See: New muon decay experiment to search for heavy sterile neutrino and also The LSND/MiniBooNe excess events and heavy neutrino from muon and kaon decays

The historical experiment upon which the model muon experiment is based was performed by Rossi and Hall in 1941. They measured the flux of muons at a location on Mt Washington in New Hampshire at about 2000 m altitude and also at the base of the mountain. They found the ratio of the muon flux was 1.4, whereas the ratio should have been about 22 even if the muons were traveling at the speed of light, using the muon half-life of 1.56 microseconds. When the time dilation relationship was applied, the result could be explained if the muons were traveling at 0.994 c.

In an experiment at CERN by Bailey et al., muons of velocity 0.9994c were found to have a lifetime 29.3 times the laboratory lifetime.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

The location of the muon detector on the slopes of the Vesuvius volcano.

Like X-ray scans of the human body, muon radiography allows researchers to obtain an image of the internal structures of the upper levels of volcanoes. Although such an image cannot help to predict ‘when’ an eruption might occur, it can, if combined with other observations, help to foresee ‘how’ it could develop and serves as a powerful tool for the study of geological structures.

Muons come from the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere. They are able to traverse layers of rock as thick as one kilometre or more. During their trip, they are partially absorbed by the material they go through, very much like X-rays are partially absorbed by bones or other internal structures in our body. At the end of the chain, instead of the classic X-ray plate, is the so-called 'muon telescope', a special detector placed on the slopes of the volcano.

Cosmic ray muon radiography is a technique capable of imaging variations of density inside a hundreds of meters of rock. With resolutions up to tens of meters in optimal detection conditions, muon radiography can give us images of the top region of a volcano edifice with a resolution that is significantly better than the one typically achieved with conventional gravity methods and in this way can give us information on anomalies in the density distribution, such as expected from dense lava conduits, low density magma supply paths or the compression with depth of the overlying soil.

The MU-RAY project is aimed toward the study of the internal structure of Stromboli and Vesuvius volcanoes using this technique.